Heal the battle with your Inner Rebel

Power is a form of love

This coming February I’m excited to share that I’ll be offering a new course on healing your relationship with power and food. Why power, you may ask?

It helps to step back a bit.

The two gates of healing with food

If I had to give you an overview of the healing process with food, there are two primary ‘gates of healing’ that you walk through.

The first is the gate of vulnerability. In this stage of the journey, the heart softens. Your perspective changes: rather than judging yourself for ‘not doing better,’ or blaming yourself for overeating, you start to see that there’s something really tender underneath.

Your self compassion grows, and you move to care for the vulnerability that lies underneath food compulsions with greater kindness and tenderness.

This is where you understand and may even share with people, “Oh, I get it – it’s not at all about the food!”

It’s also an area where nearly everyone struggles, to one degree or another – especially if you’re more sensitive and intuitive by nature, and especially when there’s been trauma.

It’s one of the reasons why support can be so helpful – we’re not meant to go through these gates alone, and without help.

Do you wonder if you’re at this stage of the journey?

Challenges with power and food can show up in the following ways:

• you have a lot of compassion for yourself, but still have a hard time telling yourself no or setting limits
• you ping pong back and forth between ways of eating that are either too strict or too lenient
• you have a strong inner food rebel who resists any limits with food
• you struggle with ‘self sabotage’
• you have a lot of desire, but collapse when you try new things

This stage of the journey can be really frustrating, especially if you’ve done a lot of work to be more compassionate to yourself. You may even feel hopeless, like ‘compassion doesn’t work.’

If you recognize yourself in this list, take heart – it’s a great place to be, for it means you’re primed for this next stage of the journey. And while it may seem hopeless, it’s not – it’s merely that different qualities of love are being asked for in your relationship with food.

You’re being invited into the dance with power.

The challenge with power

Because most of us were raised in cultures that have conflicted and confusing relationships with power, and because we’ve all experienced the pain when power is used in hurtful ways, this can cause us to reject power as something ‘bad.’

We may feel so afraid of potentially hurting ourselves (or others) that we shy away from using power and self leadership in our relationship with food.

Power is a form of love

But without a healthy relationship with power, we suffer. An absence of power and direction doesn’t leave us feeling nurtured, but the opposite: overwhelmed, unsupported, and unprotected.

It’s counterintuitive, but a healthy relationship with power is what helps you feel grounded, cared for, protected, and strong.

In a nutshell, power can be and is a form of love.

It’s healthy to thirst for power

Your hunger for power is not wrong, but arises from a desire for self leadership and empowerment – the desire to be the leader of your life.

It’s a natural and necessary stage of your development, and is how you emerge into your own viable being.

There are beautiful gifts and offerings your heart longs to give to the world. And there are ways you long to nourish and care for your body so that it feels healthy, cared for, vital, and strong.

A healthy relationship with power supports you in offering your gifts and caring for your body with presence, wisdom and strength.

And a healthy relationship with power is the ground, the ballast, that helps you venture forward.

I’ll be talking more about power over the coming weeks on the blog. And if this topic interests you, stay tuned – I’ll be sharing more about the nuts and bolts of the class so you can see if it’s a good fit for you.

In closing, I invite you to sit with your relationship with power and wonder a bit. You might ask yourself – how do I relate to power? And how does power long to express itself in my life?

And then watch, feel, and listen – listen with the ears of your heart – for the answers.

Battling your Inner Rebel?

Find the power to follow through

When you want to make changes with food or your body, you may bump into your Inner Rebel and encounter a "NO" against your longing to grow. How might it feel to express a greater sense of power? To follow through on your desires with less friction, less inner conflict? Finally, you can experience the change you've desired.